Barry Kessler: Walk will remember Henry Davis, an Annapolis lynching victim

Horror, anger, shame, understanding, resolve.

These emotions flood the heart as a visitor confronts one of the ugliest chapters of American history at the National Lynching Museum and Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Recently opened by the Equal Justice Initiative, the project’s informative and powerful displays call us to the recognition of historical wrongs and to activism to erase the legacies of slavery.

Visiting last spring as part of my congregation’s Civil Rights Journey, I found myself educated, moved and transformed.

The museum reveals how even after legal emancipation, former slaves remained in subservience, in a chokehold of sharecropping, strict vagrancy laws, disenfranchisement and segregation. Shelves hold jars of soil collected from known lynching sites around the country, testifying to the racial terror that enforced white supremacy.

At the memorial nearby, seemingly endless graveyard-like rows of iron blocks blanket a hilltop that is crowned by a structure, which at first seems sheltering and cool, like a pine grove.

But instead of trees, hundreds of hanging iron blocks — duplicates of the horizontal ones outside — crowd close around you, bearing witness to the men, women and children murdered in extra-judicial killings. Each block lists the known lynchings in a state or county, some with 20 or 30 names.

On that sunny morning last May, I sought out the block for Anne Arundel — one of only four Maryland counties that “earned” its own. While the hanging blocks form a powerful, permanent memorial, the horizontal blocks are intended to be transported to their counties as catalysts for each community to document, reckon with and address its history of white supremacy.

We have much work to do here in Anne Arundel. To start, we can commemorate each of the victims.

On Friday, a coalition of civil rights organizations will walk in memory of Henry Davis, who was forcibly sprung from Annapolis’ Calvert Street jail on that date in 1906, tortured and dragged through the city by a murderous, lawless mob — none of whom were ever prosecuted for the crime.

We invite all to join us as we tell the story of Henry Davis and recall his humanity, taking one step forward together along a path of truth and reconciliation.

This remembrance is a call for a broad commitment to racial justice. The perpetrators of lynching are dead and were never called to account personally; the time is overdue to recognize this form of brutality and strive to alleviate its dire consequences.

Segregated schools, businesses and public spaces may be gone, but the legacies they left of poverty, differential treatment and lingering white supremacy taint our community and dog attempts to build a just society. It is not enough to apologize for the crimes of lynching; although a necessary step, we must all come together and take action.

Schools must enhance how they teach the story of Jim Crow and its supremacist ideology — and the heroic efforts of the civil rights struggle to overturn it. Recognizing that racism is infused in every aspect of society, citizens and our elected officials must commit to eradicating it. 

Please join us in our efforts to remember the victims and seek reconciliation. While the road to justice may be long, Anne Arundel County can become a place where all citizens learn from our past, understand how injustice affects us all today, and be inspired to build the fair and equitable society of the future.

 The remembrance begins promptly at 6:30 p.m. at the Civil Rights Foot Soldiers Memorial in Annapolis.  For more information, contact Connecting the Dots at ctdaaco@gmail.com.